The university has licensed an unlimited number of Mathematica seats. Once installed on our systems, we simply checkout a license from the university license server. (license-manager.uchicago.edu)

Mathematica on the HEP cluster is in /code/Mathematica. There are a few different versions there because different versions of linux will run different versions of Mathematica. To find out your version of the operating system, run

cat /etc/redhat-release

It should come up as Scientific Linux 3.X, 4.X or 5.X. Users on systems running 3.X should run the 6.0 version of Mathematica. Those on later versions may run the 7.0 version of Mathmatica.

You will need to set your PATH environment variable to the path of the version that you want to use (export PATH=$PATH:/code/Mathematica/7.0/Executables) or simply type the entire path in to start the program (/code/Mathematica/7.0/Executables/mathematica). If you want to run mathematica over ssh, you'll also need to setup the fonts that it will use. So you would want to run something like this:

[othersystem]:~ xset fp+ tcp/tux.uchicago.edu:7100
[othersystem]:~ ssh -Y cdf3.uchicago.edu
[maryh@cdf3 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Scientific Linux Fermi LTS release 4.5 (Wilson)
[maryh@cdf3 ~]$ /code/Mathematica/7.0/Executables/mathematica &

Mathematica can be installed on any windows or mac computer on-campus. Off-campus the software won't work because it will not be able to check-out a license from the university license manager. The software can be downloaded here.

There is a web tutorial for Mathematica here.